When to choose a CMS like WordPress or a framework like Laravel

If you are an entrepreneur looking to build the next big tech empire, you have likely asked the question — can I build this in WordPress or should I use a php framework like Laravel?

Most of you already know what WordPress is; and who could blame you!? Around 15,886,000 websites on the entire web use WordPress.The New York Observer, New York Post, TED, Thought Catalog, Williams, USA Today, CNN, Fortune.com, TIME.com, National Post, Spotify, TechCrunch, CBS Local, NBC all use WordPress. Most developers love WordPress because it offers flexibility, its SEO friendly, secure, and the development cycle is pretty fast. Laravel on the other hand is more for custom stuff. WordPress is for plug and play purposes. It’s a CMS. If you want to build the next Facebook or some mind-blowing platform, use Laravel. If you want to build a fashion blog or e-commerce store, use WordPress.

Many people build custom vehicles from scratch, or from fabricating other car parts (libraries) to work together. Using a brilliant framework, like Laravel, is like having an excellent workshop with many tools at your disposal to get the job done. Whereas using an application, like WordPress, is like starting with a production car, something that already operates for a specific task, in this case blogging. Both have pros and cons.

A custom car (Laravel) often takes longer, is harder to maintain and is more prone to learning from mistakes, resulting in more bugs; yet it is more flexible, crafted by hand and can perform huge functions for unique needs.

A production car (CMS) / (WORDPRESS) is quicker, you work as a team (others using the same car), there is less low level programming so less bugs, has maintenance and upgrade paths; however it can be less flexible, makes assumptions about how the site should behave, custom features often need to be “bolted on” as after market parts or hacked in and the end result might be identified as a modified piece of work (to a trained eye).

WordPress is usually the top pick :

The project falls under the category of content-based portals such as blogs/newspapers.

The market has available WordPress plugins with the necessary quality/security and functionality to suit software requirements.

The founder of the startup wants to test the market and to create the first version of the website fast/cheap with a stripped-down functionality. In this case, WordPress can be useful as a prototype and platform for a minimal viable product.

WordPress is a system for managing content. So if the project falls under the category of content-based portal like blog/newspaper/course/portfolio — then WordPress is usually no.1 choice. It doesn’t make sense to re-create with Laravel all great features of content management — there’s a whole lot of them under the hood: draft auto-saving, images gallery, tags/categories etc.

On the other hand, if your project is full of user-based actions like registration, internal messages, upload content, voting, matching profiles, payment history and similar stuff — then custom framework-based code is much better. To be fair, all of that is POSSIBLE to achieve with WordPress and plugins, but for long-term projects it might be harder to maintain, cause you would be attached to the plugins and their structure/updates etc.

The following features serve as Laravel’s key design points

Bundles provide a secluded packaging system since the release of Laravel 3, with bundled features already available for easy expansion to applications. Furthermore, Laravel 4 uses Composer as a dependency manager to include framework-skeptic and Laravel-specific PHP packages available from the Packagist repository.

Eloquent ORM (object-relational mapping) is an advanced PHP implementation of the active record pattern, giving at the same time internal methods for enforcing requirements on the relationships between database objects. Taking after the active record pattern, Eloquent ORM presents database tables as classes, with their object instances tied to single table lines.

Query builder, available since Laravel 4, provides a more direct database access alternative to the Eloquent ORM. Instead of requiring SQL queries to be written directly, Laravel’s query builder provides a set of classes and methods capable of building queries automatically. It likewise permits selectable storing of the results of executed queries.

Application rationale is an integral piece of developed applications, implemented either by utilizing controllers or as a major aspect of the route declarations. The language structure used to define application rationale is like the one used by Sinatra framework.

Reverse directing defines a relationship between the connections and routes, rolling out it possible for later improvements to routes to be naturally propagated into relevant connections. When the connections are created by utilizing names of existing routes, the appropriate uniform resource identifiers (URIs) are naturally created by Laravel.

Class auto stacking provides automated stacking of PHP classes without the need for manual maintenance of consideration ways. On-demand stacking prevents consideration of unnecessary components, so just the really used components are loaded.

View composers serve as customizable intelligent code units that can be executed when a view is loaded.

Blade templating engine combines one or more templates with an information model to produce resulting views, doing that by transpiling the templates into cached PHP code for improved performance. Blade likewise provides its very own set control structures, for example, contingent statements and circles, which are internally mapped to their PHP counterparts. Furthermore, Laravel services might be called from Blade templates, and the templating engine itself can be extended with custom directives.

Using Laravel can help you avoid Technical Debt!

Technical debt happens when, over time, your codebase accumulates problems that need to be fixed before new features can be implemented. Maybe you needed to push a new feature through the door hastily; maybe a newer developer created a function in a less-than-elegant way. Maybe a piece of functionality in your site needs to be extended beyond its original application, and the code must be updated to uncouple the capability from its current application area. In any case, technical debt has a tendency to grow if you don’t actively work to minimize it — and this is particularly true for more complex web apps. And like financial debt, as technical debt grows, it can become a huge problem that halts ongoing progress.

For example, the Laravel framework strongly pushes developers to adopt principles of Object Oriented Programming. There are also a lot of modern programming principles (such as SOLID coding practices) that are commonly talked about within the context of Laravel — in training materials and forums, for example — which in turn fosters better coding practices and places a bigger barrier against technical debt.

Bottom line: you won’t waste time or money fixing avoidable issues.

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